Princess Diana: Royal Family Hounded Her To The End

Cold-hearted Prince Charles hounded Princess Diana right up until her last days on earth, claimed royal insiders and her own grieving family!

Blasting the fact that Prince Charles had stripped her of her royal status in the last year, Diana's brother Charles Spencer angrily told the mourners at Westminster Abbey in 1997: "She was someone with a natural ability who proved in the last year that she needed no royal title to continue to generate her particular brand of magic." And in revolt against her shabby treatment, said sources, Di even refused to use her royal bodyguards anymore!

Diana also had to live with the constant fear that the Queen would exercise her power to prevent her precious sons William and Harry from traveling abroad to join her on vacations. Veteran London columnist Julie Birchill says in the last weeks of her life, Diana was up against ''a level of deliberate exploitation, manipulation and deceit that would be dazzling if it wasn't so vile."

Diana, who was finally officially divorced from Princes Charles in 1996, even disclosed to her new love Dodi Fayed that she felt threatened by the constant oversight of the Windsors. "They think they have a right — a duty, even — to know everything I'm doing because I'm William's mother," Diana reportedly told the Fayeds.

It was only because "she felt too hemmed in" that Diana went without her Scotland Yard bodyguards, said Virginia Newmyer, a British social historian formerly at Washington's prestigious American University. "Had she had the proper bodyguards — the ones who are accustomed to guarding the Royal Family — they would never have permitted a driver such as the one who was chosen, first of all, to drive the car at all!"

Newmyer added at the time of Diana's death that, "as an historian, I must point out that her death eventually will end up being something of a convenience for the Royal Family because she has been a thorn in their side." Royal biographer Sarah Bradford agreed, saying: "There may have been times when he might have wished her off the face of the earth."

She added that Charles' "haunting sense of guilt" must be even harder to bear than the normal shock and sadness. And journalist Richard Kay, a longtime friend and confidante of Diana's, says Charles was so guilt-ridden after her death that he got up at 6:30 after a night of no sleep and too many gin martinis to walk on the Scottish moors.

Diana's former lover James Hewitt told The National ENQUIRER why Charles and the Buckingham Palace bullies couldn't leave her alone even after the divorce. "Their obsession was that Diana must not become so unstable that people would fear for Prince William, the future king. He must be seen to be a perfect candidate for the role, not a boy who might have inherited some form of insanity."

Hewitt also revealed that palace aides had secretly taped phone conversations between him and Di. "They were never published, but they told me about them. I felt it was a form of blackmail. Our conversations were pretty raunchy, and I still don't know where those tapes are!"

Diana remained convinced that palace spies were bugging her apartments at Kensington Palace and reported her every move to Charles. She also blamed them for the embarrassing leaked "Squidgy" tapes that exposed an intimate conversation with lover James Gilbey.

Once the couple had separated, details of Di's spending were leaked in a bundle of accounts that showed she was splurging about $2,000 a week. Diana was then stripped of her royal title — out of pure spite, insisted the experts. As Bradford noted: "Diana found herself once more alone, emotionally, mentally and physically abandoned by a husband whose love had proved to be a fleeting illusion."